She Said: “I Need a Place to Stay”… He Replied: “ I Need a Wife to Give My Dying Bloodline an Heir.”

Chapter 18

Ellen heard it at the christening.

It came from Lady Fell, who was sixty and had the best manners in that part of England and had never said an unkind word to anybody in her life, and who came up to Ellen after the service with both hands out and said, with perfect warmth:

“My dear. How clever of you.”

Ellen took the hands, and smiled, and said thank you, and stood in that churchyard for another quarter of an hour being congratulated by nine people, every one of whom was pleasant, and not one of whom said one word that could have been written down and complained about.

How clever of you.

She worked at that sentence all the way home in the carriage, the way she had worked at the rector’s wife’s sentence in July. And by the time they came up the drive she had it.

How clever of you. Not how happy. Not what a blessing. Not one single word about the child. Clever — because a girl is not an heir, and a girl does not save the house, and therefore there was now nothing at all that the world could call the marriage but what it had called it in the first place, and the whole thing had arrived at last in the shape that suited them.

And Lady Fell had not meant one syllable of harm. That was the whole of it. Lady Fell had meant, in her own mind, to be kind. She had meant to say: you have managed your impossible position well, and nobody blames you, and we shall all be nice to you for the rest of your life.

Ellen Rooke sat in the carriage and looked out at her own drive and understood, finally and completely, that she was never going to be able to answer it. Not with a defence. Not with a document. Not with a settlement read out in a room, or a garden opened, or an orchard planted, or a chair sat in at two in the morning.

There was only one thing that would ever answer it, and it was a thing that only time could do.

“Ellen,” said Adrian, from the other side of the carriage.

“Mm.”

“You have been quiet for a mile and a half.”

“I know.”

“What did she say to you?”

She looked at him.

“She said I was clever,” said Ellen. “And she said it holding both my hands, and she meant it as a kindness, and there is not one thing I can do about it.”

Adrian Vane sat back against the squabs. He understood immediately, of course. He always did — that was the thing about him, that had been the thing about him from the beginning, and it had been, in eight months, both the best and the loneliest part of being married to him.

“The only answer is years,” he said.

“The only answer is years.”

“Then we shall have to have a great many of them,” said Adrian Vane. “And I find that I have recently become extremely determined about that.”